In a radio communication network, certain network elements or devices need to, from time to time, perform different forms of signal measurement in order to determine what signals are available. The device performing the signal measurement could for instance be a moving user equipment (UE) intending to handover to another base station or access point. Usually, such handover implies that slightly different transmission (TX) and/or reception (RX) frequencies are used; the reason behind this difference is the fact that in a radio communication network, for the benefit of interference coordination, the base stations which serve adjacent cells are usually configured to operate on different frequencies.
Once the UE is connected to a base station, it thus conducts signal measurement to obtain knowledge of what other base stations may be available and of the frequency or frequencies they are transmitting on. This knowledge allows the UE to locate neighbouring base stations in order to determine if a handover should be performed.
In case the UE is active transmitting data to a base station or receiving data therefrom, performing the above described signal measurement implies that there must be certain time intervals, or gaps, available so that the signal receiver equipment of the UE can switch to another frequency in order to perform the measurement. This means that the data rate should be increased during the time when the measurement is not performed in order to compensate for the fact that the effective reception time for the desired signal is decreased. Although such kinds of intervals for performing signal measurement may be regulated by a standard, it is highly desirable that the resulting gaps can be avoided or at least minimized. A solution in the conventional art is to use a separate receiver for performing signal measurement, but this approach is costly.